PC America’s Death Wish

William Kilpatrick’s black comedy Insecuritycomes at an opportune moment. It revolves around a planned Islamic coup of the United States, containing scenes many readers would regard as too over the top even for satire. But such readers might see the value of such an exercise in extreme parody after last week’s Rose Garden ceremony, at which President Obama treated the trade of five Islamic terrorists for a deserter and possible defector as a glorious moment for the United States and listened approvingly as the soldier’s father prayed to “Allah.”

Kilpatrick’s tale imagines an America in the most advanced stages of political correctness, the outlines of which can be glimpsed in events such as the Rose Garden ceremony, the proposed mosque near the site of 9/11, and the Fort Hood shooting. Kilpatrick takes gleefully cartoonish aim at a culture that is increasingly open to Islam, closed to Christianity, and enamored with soft-headed liberalism.

His protagonist, James Cassandra, the U.S. army captain who learns of the imminent Islamic coup within the military and seeks to stop it, meets politically correct resistance at every turn. His commanding officer, General Coddle, pooh-poohs his fears, saying that the expanding Islamic presence in the military is part of the Army’s “Proud to Be Me” program.

Sharing his fears with a fellow soldier, Cassandra is told that the “army’s just trying to reach out to minorities.” Cassandra finds his base, Fort Camp, to be an admixture of “Provincetown and Mecca.” General Coddle is too busy increasing the “LGBT” presence on it to care about Cassandra’s concerns. Cassandra asks him how Islamic culture and gay culture will successfully coexist within the military. The general replies, “That’s a common misunderstanding of Islam, Jim. In reality, our Muslim boys are about the most tolerant, accepting people I know. I believe their religion requires them to reach out to others.”

The Fort Hood shooting, Coddle instructs Cassandra, was due not to any sensitivity to Islam but to an insufficient embrace of the religion: “the lesson we learned from Fort Hood is that we need more Muslims in the military. Our behavioral experts determined that Major Hasan was a lone wolf who couldn’t find the support and understanding he needed. There simply weren’t enough fellow Muslims around to steer him straight. If our affirmative action strategy were in place then, that tragedy could have been averted. That’s the lesson of Fort Hood, Jim.”

The Islamic coup planners take full advantage of the vulnerabilities political correctness creates, all the while planning to subjugate its decadent proponents. One is told by a gay soldier that “Homophobia” and “Islamophobia” are “just two sides of the same coin.” While privately regarding their left-wing allies as “filthy atheist dogs,” the coup planners use them to advance it. When Cassandra travels to Washington, D.C., in hopes of finding a sympathetic general to stop the coup, he runs into left-wing protests in favor of a mosque on the National Mall (the proposal includes use of the Washington Monument as the mosque's minaret). The media refers to the country's growing enthusiasm for Islam as “America’s Arab Spring.”

The plot takes some surprising twists and turns, with the useful idiots of the left treating the insane as normal and the normal as insane, treating defenses of the Constitution as hate speech and propaganda for radical Islam as the epitome of “American values.” Needless to say, the political class isn’t of much help in the crisis, as pols spend their time debating the proper colors on alert charts and hyperactively monitoring uses of the word “terrorist” and “jihad.” Meanwhile, the president is preoccupied with, among many other frivolous things, the political fallout from his “nationalization of the dating services,” dismay at his “appointment of the rapper XYY as head of the National Endowment of the Arts,” and an eagerness to see the “transgendered” integrated into the military. President Prince’s Islamophilia doesn’t help either, as the prospect of a “Second” and “Third Lady” appeal to him under a power-sharing agreement with Islam.

Beneath Kilpatrick’s satire lies his serious and indisputable point, one which the all-too-real Rose Garden ceremony last week underscores: liberalism, which sees almost all religions as illiberal save Islam, puts America in a constant state of insecurity.

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